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1.7.1-Pilferingapples
Brick!club Les Miserablès: Fantine Book 7: The Champmathieu Affair: Sister Simplice 1.7.1 In Which Hugo gets his weird classism on some more! Seriously, peasant clay? Hugo, buddy. I love you but come ON. I love the image of Sister Simplice and Sister Perpetue rocking around the sickhouse together. I am totally going with the idea that they’re friends, and both really enjoy their work, even if Hugo’s going to try and turn them into opposing symbols. I do like the image of them both as candles, but made of different materials. Keeping up Hugo’s metaphor (and why not) wax candles would have been much more expensive and rarer for most people to get; tallow might not have been as effective, but it was what most people could access. And I can see a lot of people being really uncomfortable with Simplice and her Absolute Truth and self-enforced semiliteracy (she reads NOTHING but a prayerbook? What if patients have correspondence they need read to them? …Call in Perpetue?), and trying to deal with Perpetue instead, ‘rough clay or not. …Also, a ‘latent virtue in Fantine? Fantine’s loving, self-sacrificing and trusting and maybe the trusting bit’s gotten her into SOME TROUBLE but I’m pretty sure that’s supposed to be a good thing, virtues- wise? She hasn’t got any spark of vanity left, either. What this ‘latent’ nonsense? Some folks like the plot chapters, but I have a serious fondness for the character sketch interludes; I know it’s considered nigh-unpublishable nowadays, but I could roll up in these Observations from on High and spend a good long chapter or two reading nothing else. There’s never enough backstory, either! Has Simplice never lied IN HER LIFE? Even when she was a kid? Was she a peasant too? Are she and Perpetue from the same general area of the country, or did they meet in their sister-ness? SO MANY QUESTIONS, never enough development, even with a whole chapter of description, because there’s actual plot due to happen now. Darn. Next Chapter: ACTUAL PLOT HAPPENS, and no one has invented kicking tires yet I guess! Commentary Timegoddessrose SISTER SIMPLICE IS MY FAVORITE FEMALE CHARACTER OMG JRHTJEWHTJEHT Gascon-en-exile I don’t know how I forgot how many points of Catholic dogma and ritual get covered in the Brick, but Hugo here is kind enough to spell out some of the particulars (ex. clergy taking saints’ names along with their vows, Lazarists as an order under St. Vincent de Paul) so that I don’t have to. I will say that, as Wikipedia informs me, the Lazarists got into a fair amount of trouble with Buonaparte, such that their appearance here only a few years after the end of his reign is probably significant. Simplice herself appears to be the model of the active religious life just as Myriel exemplifies the model priest. For anyone who wants a clearer idea of the difference between a nun and a sister (or a monk and a brother), I refer you to the quoted section of this chapter’s long paragraph, which takes symbols of the contemplative life of nuns (convents, cells, veils, etc.) and exchanges them for symbols of the active life of sisters. This passage doesn’t seem to suggest that the active life is wholly superior or supplants the contemplative life (conventional belief holds that the opposite is true, in fact), but it’s a fitting mission statement for religious sisterhood of the type that Simplice perfects. And yes, the description of Perpétue is classist, but as Hugo admits that even clergy of her mindset can do good I think that perhaps her indifference to faith is indicative of the financial need that drives the lower class much more strongly than anyone else. In other words, poverty can be such a burden that it can lead people to treat religion only in coldly practical terms. Pilferingapples (reply to Gascon-en-exile) I am learning more about Catholicism with this book and your comments than I have known in ever, I swear. WHUMP on that last paragraph. Wow, that totally redeems all the Perpètue stuff for me, thanks. Interesting about the Lazarists— presumably the audience at the time would have known about that, at least some of them. I wonder what they would have made of it? Seriously, I wonder, I have no idea. But it’s an interesting bit of information! Nothing-rhymes-with-grantaire (reply to Pilferingapples' reply) Reblogging to read this because I just started in on this section talking about Simplice and Perpetue.